Authors: Elliott Abrams
Intense fighting between Hamas and Fatah continued during January 2007, and there were especially heavy clashes in the first four days of February. Each side set up roadblocks, kidnapped people from the other party, attacked the other's strong points, and executed people whom they captured. There were occasional truces, which were soon violated as more murders followed a few hours of calm. Arab television viewers were still seeing plenty of violence in Gaza and some in the West Bank, but it was not Israeli-Palestinian violence; the bloodshed they were now seeing was Palestinian on Palestinian. The Israelis were spectators to this fighting and no doubt turned a blind eye when Fatah forces in Gaza were sent additional weapons or ammunition from the West Bank. Fatah and Hamas seemed evenly matched, or at least neither side appeared to have much of an upper hand; perhaps we and the Israelis should have been more startled by this because on paper, Hamas was greatly outnumbered. Such fighting certainly met any test the Israelis put to the PA on whether it was fighting terrorism and seeking to dismantle terrorist groups, as the Roadmap required. Whatever its motivation, the PA was acting.
This action laid a foundation for possible negotiations, though the Israelis and we – and the Quartet, at least in principle – were still nervous about the prospect of a Palestinian national unity government that might follow a truce. But Abbas had assured us that negotiations with Hamas were finished, and the violence we saw suggested such hostility that a coalition government was increasingly unthinkable.
Shortly after New Year's, Secretary Rice traveled to the region again. Rice thought the timing was right to continue her push for final status negotiations between Israel and the PA, though they were described as discussions of Phase III of the Roadmap while implementation would be delayed until the key condition of Phase I – an end to terrorism – was fulfilled. The Israelis resisted – a pattern that would repeat itself over the next two years. Tourgeman and
Turbowitz were especially tough, but Olmert was less so. In part, this difference reflected the simple fact that they were behind-the-scenes advisors while he
was an elected political leader trying to hold onto a relationship with Rice and
Bush. In part, it reflected their real positions because as we would see very clearly in 2008, Olmert was willing to contemplate concessions that his advisors did not support. In these January 2007 discussions, we laid out a plan for simultaneous work on Phase I and discussion of Phase III. To the Israelis, this was an abandonment of the Roadmap and
a demand that they negotiate while terrorism continued.
The Israelis were not shocked by this plan – I knew this was coming, said Turbo – but they were totally opposed to it. Tourgeman took up the argument: Discussing the status of Jerusalem and the return of refugees will bring about the next intifada because the discussion will fail and that failure will harm Abbas. What can we offer him? Shalom asked. The most he can get from any Israeli government is something like 90% of the West Bank, no right of return, and something on Jerusalem – and if he offers that to the Palestinians, he will fail. Hamas will say they want the 1967 borders, and a right of return, and all of Jerusalem like they had before 1967. We cannot have adventures, and we cannot go forward in the dark; this is an adventure.
We had often told the Israelis that this process was like riding a bike: You could not stop or you would fall off, so you had to keep moving forward. It is true that you will fall off a bike if it is not moving forward, Shalom acerbically told us, but it is better to fall off when you stop the bike than to fall off it at 100 km speed. We don't want to see what happened to Clinton now happen to Bush: actions that are counterproductive and an end result that is a setback. Final status talks now will fail because agreement cannot be reached on Jerusalem, refugees, and the borders. This failure could harm Abbas, who is too weak to lead his people to accept what Israel can offer now. And anyway, the Israelis argued, to move forward now is to abandon the Roadmap because the Roadmap requires serious action on security first.
These arguments left Condi cold, but I agreed with them on the whole. I did not see how such negotiations could help Abbas, especially because we were all talking about a “shelf agreement.” That is, we all agreed with the Israelis that a final status agreement could not be implemented at this time. Condi's idea was nevertheless to negotiate such an agreement to give the Palestinians a “political horizon” but then to put it on the shelf for some years until the preconditions were met. To me, it seemed this formula would be disastrous to both the Israelis and the PA. For Abbas, it meant that whatever concessions he made – which were bound, as Tourgeman had said, to be attacked by Hamas and other extremist groups as treason – he would be unable to show anything but an Israeli promise that someday, down the road, at a date the Israelis would judge appropriate, there would be a state. How could such a situation benefit Abbas? I also believed, as noted before, that there would be immense and irresistible pressure on the Israelis to shorten the wait and to move to the
implementation phase even if the conditions were not right. So I thought that the wait, the time “on the shelf,” would be long enough to undermine Abbas but not long enough to ensure that all the sensible preconditions were met. A perfect storm.
Yet that was our policy, and while I fought it internally, I supported it in meetings with the parties. It did not seem to me this policy could work, and I believed that the Israelis and Palestinians would come to the same analysis I did – regardless of what they said to U.S. officials – and would never accept a shelf agreement. So I stayed in the game, pushing what I thought was a more realistic path: keep some negotiations going while building up the PA's security forces so that they could successfully fight terror. Under Gen. Keith Dayton, who had replaced Gen. Ward, U.S. training efforts were beginning in earnest. Initially, Ward and then Dayton had no budget but that was remedied over time, and Dayton arranged to use a training center in Jordan. An initially ragged effort gradually picked up steam, training not a PA army but a decent police force, more along the lines of a gendarmerie on the European model. President Bush had once asked Abbas, during an Oval Office visit, whether he was able to send forces anywhere; if he picked up the phone, would anything happen? No, Abbas had acknowledged. We aimed to change that – to give the PA a professional force that could jump into nasty situations, could be deployed in particular cities or towns to keep order, could gradually show real professionalism and gain the respect of Palestinians. Dayton's main problems, initially, were a lack of funds and a lack of a decent interlocutor on the PA side. Who was really in charge and dedicated to developing a professional force and would ensure that the force was not tainted by politics and corruption?
The meeting Welch and
I had with Turbo and Tourgeman found us entirely at odds. We concluded by telling them the theme for the secretary's trip was how to accelerate completion of the Roadmap
and
“contemplate the establishment of a Palestinian state.” With our bicycle metaphor, we argued the need for progress and the impossibility of standing still but, as noted, Tourgeman argued that falling off was inevitable and you would at least not get hurt if you were not speeding when you did fall. We tried another metaphor: The Palestinians needed to see where this was going. We would “build the house” by describing the Palestinian state but tell them they could not “move in” until their obligations had been met. The Europeans liked this metaphor and talked enthusiastically about building the house, furnishing it, painting it, and preparing it. But “T and T” were not buying this one either; they asked if we could not see what happens to an unoccupied house. It can collapse or attract squatters; it is dangerous. You are destroying the Roadmap to save it, Shalom concluded. Why is a Palestinian state a success if it is a failed state, a terrorist state? His arguments seemed to me far stronger than ours.
In Rice's meeting with Olmert, she had a new agenda item: her own role. She was firmly pressing now for trilateral meetings in which she would join Abbas and Olmert. Olmert did not care for the idea, if I was any judge of body language, but he was not prepared then to fight it. I did not then see how
trilaterals could advance the negotiating process, and later did see with my own eyes that in fact they slowed it down. Rice told Olmert she would be back in February, and March, and as often as was needed; she would tell the press that the United States was deepening its involvement and beginning now to engage the bigger issues. The Roadmap
was central, but broader issues would be on the table as well. Whatever Olmert's private view, at that point he did not push back.
In Rice's meetings with the Palestinians, the message was the same. We would discuss how to complete the Roadmap, and though we would not use the term “final status,” we would “contemplate the establishment of a Palestinian state.” When, she asked the Palestinians, could the informal talks they were having with the Israelis be transformed into more formal negotiations? At that point, the United States could do more; we could say we were launching a formal negotiation and could get the Quartet or the Security Council or the key Arab states to bless this effort. The Palestinians thought about it and said perhaps the informal talks could continue for the rest of 2007; they were far more focused on the Fatah-Hamas fighting than on negotiations with the Israelis. Moreover, I thought this was proof I had it right: They were happy with informal talks that showed the “peace process” was still alive but scared of formal negotiations where their concessions would have to be made and then revealed. To the secretary, waiting until 2008 to go beyond informal talks was too long; she told them something would have to move well before the end of the year.
We then flew off to Kuwait where Rice met again with Arab leaders in the format that we were calling the GCC +2: the Gulf countries (organized in the Gulf Cooperation Council
) plus Jordan and Egypt. I broke through, she told them, and we will indeed be talking about the future phases even as we implement Phase I. It's a start, and the United States will be deepening our involvement as we engage these broader issues. As we flew home to Washington, Rice told us that in her private talks with Olmert he had said six months was about right: He could move to formal negotiations in the summer. The question, she mused, was when to bring the president into this picture. In her discussions with the team en route, she was moving into the fundamental final status issues and seemed to me very clearly to intend reaching a full final status agreement in 2008. I felt that this approach ignored the signals we had gotten from the Palestinians, who were immersed in internal politics. Their focus was Hamas, not Israel. But Rice had been correct in what she told the Arabs in Kuwait: The fundamental breakthrough had been achieved. We could talk and they would talk about the final status issues of Phase III of the Roadmap even as we worked on implementing Phase I. Our metaphors had been destroyed, but our plan was intact.
On January 30, Rice had dinner alone with Sallai Meridor, the new Israeli ambassador who had arrived in November. Danny Ayalon had returned home with a plan to jump into politics, which he was able to do successfully: In the next elections, he got a seat in the Knesset and became deputy foreign minister.
Meridor had been head of the Jewish Agency
and the World Zionist Organization
, so his contacts throughout the Jewish world and in Israeli politics were very good. He was also a deeply humane and thoughtful man, highly intelligent and with a very ready sense of humor, and we had quickly become good friends. Meridor used the dinner to express his worries to Condi because he thought the distinction between a broad political horizon and actual final status talks had to be maintained. Moreover, he could not see serious negotiations occurring while Abbas was struggling for control over the Palestinian territories. The six months or so of preliminary talks were a critical period, he said, for Abbas to gain a strong position against Hamas.
A few days later, on February 5, Welch and
I met with “T and T” in London to see where things stood. The Israelis’ first message was that security remained their top priority: For the first time in months there was a suicide bombing, on January 29 at a bakery in Eilat, and people had been killed. It was the first-ever attack in Eilat. So, they said, they were clinging fast to the Roadmap with its prioritization of security matters. Their question for us was whether we had in effect abandoned the Roadmap and
decided instead to push Israel into final status negotiations even if there was no progress against terrorism. They reiterated their view that seeing whether there is “a basis for negotiations,” a formula we had used a few times, and actually “commencing negotiations” are the same thing. Welch replied that we want to discuss all three phases without necessarily moving into Phases II and III. Turbo said this approach is a big change; discussions about final status issues are final status negotiations, so starting them now means having final status negotiations without security performance. How does this differ from what Clinton did, they asked – and not for the first time. Welch told them that we did in fact want to launch final status negotiations, if not in 2007 then in 2008. Tourgeman said David had answered their question: Yes, we were abandoning the Roadmap, which the April 14 letter had promised we would not do.
I described the scene for Hadley in a memo, telling him the Israelis’ real problem is not the difficulty of final status negotiations, tough as those might be – especially when the issue of Jerusalem arose. Tougher for them was the sense that we were abandoning their security struggle and were now willing to push for final status negotiations even without a security situation that would truly permit them to live in peace. They believed there had been a fundamental change in U.S. policy.